


To Feed a Dog

by junko



Series: 'Tails' of Zabimaru [6]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-12
Updated: 2012-07-12
Packaged: 2017-11-09 20:08:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/457880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/junko/pseuds/junko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summer break is starting at Academy and Renji is feeling dangerously restless, and somehow Captain Kyouraku can always anticipate trouble brewing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Feed a Dog

 

 

 _Inu o mikka kaeba san-nen on o wasurenu, neko wa san-nen katte mikka de on o wasureru.  
_ Feed a dog for three days and it's grateful for three years; Feed a cat for three years and it forgets after three days.

 

 

Renji was supposed to be mopping the floor, but he brooded instead. He leaned on the mop and stared at the mess hall, which was empty except for serving staff and students like him on ‘work study.’

_Academy students are a bunch of privileged pigs._

The first years had left the place utterly disgusting. Those idiots were so excited that the school year was ending that they’d had a food fight. Now the mess not only lived up to its name but also smelled of fermented soybeans and fish that had sat too long in the sun.

But, that wasn’t why he was sulking. He was thinking about Rukia. She’d be gone again this summer--off to whatever it was she did at the Kuchiki estate. Reciting poetry? Drinking tea? Embroidery? Learning how to sit around being pretty and useless? Who knew?

Meanwhile, he was stuck here, watching the place empty out--spending his days tending gardens, mending fences, and doing whatever work the grounds crew could find for him. The pay was shit, especially since two-thirds of it went toward the tiny cot he occupied in the common room. Turns out, his mysterious scholarship only extended for the school year; he was on his own for summer break.

Being trapped here sucked, but Renji supposed it was better than the alternative.

Though, fuck it, maybe he should go “home.” He could make a shitload of money if he went back to Inuzuri now, with two years of Academy training under his belt. Renji smiled to himself, imagining the essay that started, “What I did with my summer vacation” and ended, “dominated the yakuza gangs of the Rukongai.”

A wet towel smacked into the side of Renji’s head, “Oi, Abarai! Quit slacking!”

Blinking back his daydream, he automatically flipped off the speaker. Then, with a sigh, Renji picked the towel off the floor. He tucked the wet rag into the side of the bucket, and got to work.

Renji continued to brood, however. There had to be something better to do with his summer than hang around here doing grunt work and not advancing.

 

#

“You’re like a creepy mind-reader, you know that?” Renji knew it was probably in poor taste to say something so bold to his benefactor, but, the guy was seriously freaking him out. How did the captain always seem to know when Renji was in danger of expulsion or going AWOL from boredom? Did that hot pink kimono of Kyōraku’s have some kind of sensor device implanted in it?

Of course, the captain laughed it off. That seemed to be his response to pretty much everything. “It just makes sense, my dear Mr. Renji. At this stage in your career, sweeping floors all summer must seem like a waste of valuable time.”

They were sitting at Kyōraku’s favorite student bar. The summer heat was oppressive. The captain fanned himself with his straw hat, as they sat across from each other at a table on the porch. The beer in front of Renji was warm, but then so was everything. It was that kind of day. Kyōraku had offered to buy some _taco aisu_ , octopus-flavored ice cream. _Taco aisu_ along with the crab-flavored version was the new fad import from the human world on campus. Renji really liked it, but he’d declined. He hated owing this guy even a cent more than he already did.

Which was why this whole proposition made him nervous.

“Spend the rest of the summer in the Thirteen Court Guard?” Renji repeated, slowly, trying to find the hidden traps, tricks. “But not as an officer, but like some kind of intern?”

“Yes, real work for a real wage.”

Renji took a long swallow of the warm beer, thinking. After he set the glass back in its sweat ring, he asked, “I’ll be working in your division?”

The captain laughed again and shook his head, sending that long curl in front of his face bounding around. “No, no, of course not. The Eighth isn’t for someone like you. I was thinking my partner Jūshirō could look after you.”

 _Look after him_. Yeah, there was something fishy about all this. But it was an intriguing offer, none-the-less. Renji had tried applying to other internships through Academy, but the interview process always fucked him over. His grades and his advance class placement always got him in the door, but after that… well, his accent had most employers afraid they were hiring a gangster or a thief. No one wanted to take the risk, no matter how many referrals he’d rustled up.

Of course, it didn’t help at all that both assumptions were true in their own way.

Thus, having a summer job like this one on his resume would be a huge boost. Not only could it pave the way for other summer work next year, but it’d be a feather in his cap come graduation. He wanted to stand out in order to get a good position right away, so he could start his climb to the top. If Rukia insisted on being so damn far away, it just meant he have to go further to get her.

“Yeah, all right,” he said finally. “Anything is better than mopping up after first years.”

 

#

Anything, it turned out, except paperwork. Renji had yet to see this Captain Ukitake outside of their first, brief introduction, but he already decided he hated the guy.

_With the passion of a thousand burning suns._

Who was this chronically behind on paperwork? And why could Ukitake never keep a lieutenant long? Probably no one wanted the job, Renji thought ruefully, because whoever got promoted to the position ran screaming the instant they saw this mountain of crap.

Renji’s job was made much worse by the fact that he understood only a fraction of what was needed. So, with every new form, he had to find the regulations in the giant volume set behind the desk, parse out its meaning, and, if he was lucky, only have to look up twenty or more words up in the dictionary because he’d never seen them written down before in his whole stupid life.

Sweeping floors was looking like a peach assignment right about now.

The door slid open, bringing with it an almost blinding swath of light. Renji winced and put his arm up to block the sudden brightness.

“You _are_ sitting here in the dark,” came a deep, pleasant male voice. “It’s far too nice a day outside to be stuck inside doing paperwork. I’m officially springing you!”

Renji’s eyes finally adjusted to see Captain Ukitake himself, standing there in a blazing array of white – between his captain’s haori and long, flowing snowy hair.

Renji blinked down at the pile he’d made almost no progress on in the last three hours. “But, sir,” he said, “There’s so… much.”

“And it will all wait until after lunch. Life is too precious to waste on such trivia.”

Renji was beginning to see how this mountain kept growing. He hesitated. He didn’t feel comfortable telling a captain ‘no,’ but, on the other hand, he’d never get through this before midnight if he took a long lunch.

“Don’t make me issue an order, cadet.”

“Uh, right,” Renji said standing up, “At your service, Taicho.”

 

#

Ukitake had Renji carrying things for a picnic near the Thirteenth Division’s lake. Given the amount of stuff he was carrying, Renji half-expected at least one of the squads to be joining them. But, once everything was laid out, it became clear this was an intimate affair—just the two of them.

Renji settled uneasily on the blanket.

From the small talk that Ukitake had kept up during their short walk down to the lakeside, Renji had surmised that the captain was from a minor noble family and was ridiculously older than he looked. Both qualities made Renji edgy. He never quite knew how to behave in situations that required genteelness and protocol.

At least it was a nice day. An early morning thunderstorm had broken the week’s heat and humidity. Though it was afternoon, the air was still cool and crisp, smelling of the earlier rain. Sandpipers scurried along the sandy shoreline, pecking after water bugs. Huge billows of clouds reflected in the still lake.

When Renji returned his attention to the picnic, it appeared Ukitake had been staring at him. “Sir?”

“So… you’re Shunsui’s latest project.”

Okay, so this was an ambush rather than a rescue.

Renji had strain to remember that ‘Shunsui’ was Captain Kyōraku, but that, at least, seemed obvious from context. What the potential landmines were, however, Renji had no clue. Not that he’d ever been good at this kind of cat-and-mouse crap, anyway. He might as well embrace what he was: a dog—straight-forward, what-you-see-is-what-you-get.

“I guess,” he said with a shrug, “Though I have no idea why.”

A dark eyebrow rose curiously. “Are you saying that Shunsui never told you about his crazy theories?”

Renji frowned. Crazy? “I’m not sure. I guess it depends what you mean, sir.”

Ukitake smiled and shook his head. From the picnic basket, he pulled out a bento box for each of them. Renji took his with a little bow and waited for the captain to open his before doing the same.

Renji found bento boxes frightening, because they were like some kind of horrible gambling game—a crap shoot. You never knew what you were getting until you lifted the lid.

Oh, nuts.

_Onigiri._

Another gamble. Now Renji just had to pray that whatever the rice balls were stuffed with, it wasn’t anything too spicy. Even he knew enough that it would be extraordinarily bad manners to spit out the captain’s food and gag.

“Shunsui has been obsessing on the idea that you might be like the new Kenpachi.”

A wild-eyed murderer? Criminally insane? Also, ‘new,’ how old _was_ Ukitake, anyway?

Renji had heard plenty of rumors about Kenpachi Zaraki, though. Academy students seemed divided on the subject of whether or not someone like Zaraki was ‘good’ for the Court Guard. Renji happened to fall into the supporter camp, but people told him that was because Zaraki was just some low-life bruiser like himself.

Maybe Renji _did_ like the idea of someone from further out than Inuzuri taking a captaincy. So he took it by force; that was his right. It was bloody, but it was perfectly within the rules. Anyway, a guy like Zaraki gave Renji hope that blood and breeding weren’t anywhere near as important as the strength of a person’s reistsu or their tenacity and ambition.

“Is that a compliment?” Renji asked, finally deciding to take the plunge and bite into the _onigiri_. He was rewarded with the sweet-sour taste of pickled apricots.

Ukitake laughed lightly. “Oh, it is, dear boy. To Shunsui, it’s a big one.”

Not knowing how to respond to that, conversation lagged. They ate in silence for a while. Renji’s attention drifted back to the lake. He was still getting used to how beautiful everything was inside the Seireitei. Purple and green lily pads floated on the lake, and bitterns hunted in the shallows. A pair of snowy geese flew overhead, honking noisily as they splash-landed in the lake.

The whole place was like a fairy tale or some beautiful dream.

Yet, even two years into Academy, Renji still startled awake in the middle of the night, terrified of the silence, the hush. In Inuzuri, that kind of quiet meant trouble—that you were suddenly left alone, or that everyone was holding their breath—waiting, perhaps literally, for the ax to fall.

It was made worse here in the Seireitei because one of them—Kyōraku or Ukitake—had thought it would be a nice “gift” to give Renji a room of his own. Renji would much rather be surrounded by other people, especially at night; there was safety in numbers. Now, it wasn’t silence that woke him so much, but every creak, rattle or hoot of night owl. At least it only took him a couple of days to memorize the patrol schedule, which was stupidly consistent. Though, he was grateful for their predictability because it meant that, when the guards passed below his window, it was of the few times he slept peacefully.

“Do you like it here?” Ukitake asked, “You seem sort of on edge.”

“Are you kidding me? I love it here. I love everything about it. This is the best place I’ve ever been,” Renji said honestly. “I’m just, you know, adjusting.”

It would take time, but eventually his brain would sort out what sounds were normal and which were not. Even if he never settled down, he’d never give up this place now that he’d found it. He might joke about going back to Inuzuri with a sword and attitude, but he’d rather die than see a single street in that hellhole again.

“Everything?” Ukitake mused playfully, “Even paperwork?”

“Uh, well….” Renji smiled wanly. “Honestly, it has its moments. They’re few and far between, but I’m learning a lot about how the Soul Society works on a nuts and bolts level.”

“Hmm,” Ukitake said, as he sipped from a can of basil seed drink. He stopped to chew thoughtfully, before continuing. “Perhaps we've accidentally given you the keys to the kingdom. An ambitious person could learn to rule us all, if one day you chose to deny toilet paper and clean socks.”

Renji nodded seriously. “Never underestimate the power of the secretary.”

 

#

That night, when Shunsui settled into bed, Jūshirō kissed his lips lightly and said, “All right. You win this one. The boy is charming in his own way.”

“And,” Shunsui said with a smile and a playful tap on Jūshirō’s nose, “I hear he’s got the makings of a decent adjutant.”

Jūshirō rolled his emerald green eyes with a sigh, “Of course you’ve already heard that. Did I even have to tell you I’d warmed to him?”

“No,” Shunsui said with a fond smile, “But I like hearing it anyway.”

“Ai, tell me again why I love you so much.”

“It’s my personality and good looks,” Shunsui laughed. Then he cupped Jūshirō’s jaw tenderly, before giving him a more passionate kiss, “And I’m awesome in bed.”

“Yes, there is that.”


End file.
